Science into Art: Acoustic Principles and Esoteric Philosophies in Chicago’s Music

Organized in partnership with the Chicago History Museum, this event will feature Dr. Anna Gawboy, Associate Professor of Musicology at The Ohio State University, and Dr. Christopher Scheer, Associate Professor of Musicology at Utah State University. In their talk, Drs. Gawboy and Scheer demonstrate acoustic principles and show how Chicago-based musicians combined those principles with philosophical ideas to generate new styles of music. The musical preferences of composers Sun Ra, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Charles Eliot Fouser were shaped by their shared interest in vibration, which they believed was a physical sensation of the unseen world. They combined scientific ideas with Asian-derived philosophies they learned from the Theosophical Society and the I Am movement.

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